Field of the Invention
The present disclosure generally relates to image forming and, more particularly, to an image forming apparatus, an image forming method, a storage medium, and to a technique for reducing a consumption amount of color material such as toner.
Description of the Related Art
There is a strong demand for reduction of a toner amount consumed by an image forming apparatus. A technique for reducing a toner consumption amount by lowering exposure intensity in an image area having a predetermined dimension has been proposed.
There is a phenomenon known as a sweep-up, which produces such a state that a developing toner amount at a rear end of a latent image becomes larger than a developing toner amount at a flat portion of the latent image. Regarding this phenomenon, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-272153 discusses a technique for replacing high density image data at a rear end of a latent image with low density image data as appropriate, to adjust an exposure amount and correct a sweep-up.